The present invention relates generally to internet searching and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for structured match in an online search system.
Since its inception, the Internet has provided a useful tool for searching for information, products or services. The Internet has also provided a means for enabling the purchase of goods and services, and providing advertisements to a vast population of Internet users. As the access to and the use of the Internet has continued to increase, new uses for the Internet have continued to evolve.
One form of advertising has been to allow vendors to bid for a particular position in a search result. That is, an advertiser is ranked according to the cost per click (“CPC”) for each search term. The CPC is the amount the advertiser will pay if a user “clicks through” on the listing. Vendors will be positioned in a search result depending upon their various bids, and will pay the amount of their respective bids in response to a click through by a user. The user enters a search query in a search box presented on a web page and receives search results on a subsequent web page. A user click through on a search result listing redirects the user's web browser to the uniform resource locator (URL) associated with the search listing.
Such a system may be referred to as a pay for placement advertising system and is operated by a web search provider. A searcher accessing the pay for placement site is presented with a search box and the opportunity to enter one or more keywords for searching. Search results are returned based on a search algorithm. The search results are ordered at least in part using the respective bids entered by vendors associated with the respective search listings.
In another form of internet advertising, advertisers have their web sites organized in the form of a hierarchical directory structure. One example of such a hierarchical advertising arrangement is a shopping site, in which goods and services are organized in broad categories. Under each category of a hierarchical directory are sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, and so on, forming a hierarchical tree. Any product offered on a shopping site can be thus categorized in the directory tree, even to include a brand name for the product and a manufacturer's model or device identifier. More generally, any item or entry in such a hierarchical directory structure has a unique location in the structure.
Such hierarchical sites may operate in conjunction with a pay for placement system. In such a case, when a user searches for information on a hierarchical site by entering a keyword, a query is sent to a searching apparatus. All entries in the hierarchical directory which form a match are returned and may be organized as search results. The search results are then presented to the user.
Directory or hierarchical advertising sites and pay for placement sites are both forms of sponsored search. Advertisers sponsor search listings which are searched for matching entries upon receipt of a keyword from a searcher. These sites have been commercially successful. However, a particular problem experienced when operating a sponsored search site is to provide effective sponsored search listings (advertisements) when a user is either navigating through a site or enters a search query in the search box within such a site.
The query about contents of a hierarchical directory to the search apparatus may be referred to as a breadcrumb query. The query contains contextual path information identifying a location in the directory. An example of a breadcrumb is as follows:
Parent category->Category->Sub-Category->Product->Attribute->etc.
In the case of a shopping web site organized as a hierarchical directory, an example breadcrumb is as follows:
Sports and Outdoors>Sport and Outdoor>Cheap Baseball Gloves>price range $100-$150
In these examples, the symbols -> are arbitrarily chosen to serve as delimiters. The words and phrases between the delimiters are individual breadcrumbs and refer to categories and sub-categories within the hierarchical directory system.
When a user navigates through any structured information site, there is no defined method or protocol for that site to provide the rich information contained in the user's action while requesting sponsored search results. When sending a query to a searching apparatus, generally, a directory site has only two options, either to send the entire breadcrumb or to send just the last node in the directory. Empirically, when only the last node or leaf node is sent to the searching apparatus, the originating directory search system experiences poor match relevance. That is, the content of the returned search results are not closely related to the searcher's interest. The result is a relatively poor click through rate, meaning that the percentage of searchers actually clicking on a returned search listing is relatively small. Further, when the entire breadcrumb is sent to the searching apparatus, poor coverage has often been the result. That is, the searching apparatus can provide search results for only a relatively small fraction of received searches which include an entire breadcrumb.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved system and method for processing search queries from hierarchical directory sites.